Your high school Spanish students have been extremely excited about a recent project in your class. Students have been writing scripts and acting out “commercials” in Spanish for imaginary products. You have recorded the commercials on a digital camcorder and uploaded the videos to YouTube. The response has been very positive to these videos, and several students have uploaded them to their personal MySpace pages and blogs to share them with friends.
However, one of your students, Olivia, just forwarded you a comment written in response to one of the videos in which she participated and asks for help translating. The comment is in Spanish and contains several sexual references and curse words. When Olivia clicks on the commenter's username to find out more about the person, she sees videos with sexual content. What do you tell your students about the comment and what Olivia saw, and how do you advise them to respond?
Preventative Ideas:
1. Before the project is started, send home a parent letter explaining the course content and how you will be using technology in the classroom. 2. Inform parents of Internet safety tips that they can share with their child. 3. Set clear expectations that the school project should only be on a school platform to possibly avoid unwanted contact on outside social media sites. 4. Give students options for user friendlier social media sites that they can share with other classmates but content is more closely monitored like Schoology or educational blog sites. 5. If the teacher still wants students to have the opportunity to share their work with a broader audience but wants to prevent this from happening in the future, he/she can advise students to use the security and privacy settings provided by MySpace. This will still enable students to share their work with peers/other users she knows but also protect her from strangers/inappropriate content.
How to Handle this Specific Incident: 1. Advise Olivia not to respond and to flag the comment as inappropriate. MySpace will investigate the comment and user. 2. Advise her to delete the comment (if possible) and be sure her MySpace account is private and can only be seen by friends. 3. Remind her that if/when someone she does not immediately recognize posts something to her account or tries to reach her via email or any other online account, she should NOT click on his/her username or information. This may not only result in her viewing inappropriate content but also result in this individual being able to hack her account/personal information. 4. Advise her to make sure she has any location sharing turned off.
Resources to Share with Students Before/After Incident:
1. This video on Internet safety might be good to show this student and her peers. It's geared toward a teen audience and provides suggestions about passwords, phone safety, what to do if you're hacked, etc. 2. Another possibility is this video which begins with the positives of social networking, etc. and then provides suggestions. 3. This video provides useful information about thinking before you post. 4. This video goes over how to have positive experiences on the Internet.
Your high school Spanish students have been extremely excited about a recent project in your class. Students have been writing scripts and acting out “commercials” in Spanish for imaginary products. You have recorded the commercials on a digital camcorder and uploaded the videos to YouTube. The response has been very positive to these videos, and several students have uploaded them to their personal MySpace pages and blogs to share them with friends.
However, one of your students, Olivia, just forwarded you a comment written in response to one of the videos in which she participated and asks for help translating. The comment is in Spanish and contains several sexual references and curse words. When Olivia clicks on the commenter's username to find out more about the person, she sees videos with sexual content. What do you tell your students about the comment and what Olivia saw, and how do you advise them to respond?
Preventative Ideas:
1. Before the project is started, send home a parent letter explaining the course content and how you will be using technology in the classroom.
2. Inform parents of Internet safety tips that they can share with their child.
3. Set clear expectations that the school project should only be on a school platform to possibly avoid unwanted contact on outside social media sites.
4. Give students options for user friendlier social media sites that they can share with other classmates but content is more closely monitored like Schoology or educational blog sites.
5. If the teacher still wants students to have the opportunity to share their work with a broader audience but wants to prevent this from happening in the future, he/she can advise students to use the security and privacy settings provided by MySpace. This will still enable students to share their work with peers/other users she knows but also protect her from strangers/inappropriate content.
How to Handle this Specific Incident:
1. Advise Olivia not to respond and to flag the comment as inappropriate. MySpace will investigate the comment and user.
2. Advise her to delete the comment (if possible) and be sure her MySpace account is private and can only be seen by friends.
3. Remind her that if/when someone she does not immediately recognize posts something to her account or tries to reach her via email or any other online account, she should NOT click on his/her username or information. This may not only result in her viewing inappropriate content but also result in this individual being able to hack her account/personal information.
4. Advise her to make sure she has any location sharing turned off.
Resources to Share with Students Before/After Incident:
1. This video on Internet safety might be good to show this student and her peers. It's geared toward a teen audience and provides suggestions about passwords, phone safety, what to do if you're hacked, etc.
2. Another possibility is this video which begins with the positives of social networking, etc. and then provides suggestions.
3. This video provides useful information about thinking before you post.
4. This video goes over how to have positive experiences on the Internet.